Read Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy Online
Authors: Kristin Flieger Samuelian
Tags: #Europe, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #England, #0230616305, #18th Century, #2010, #Palgrave Macmillan, #History
affair ended. She confided in friends and acquaintances informa-
om www
tion about the length of their assignations, or about how the Prince
eluded his parents’ vigilance by climbing—Romeo-like—over the
garden wall to be with her (Byrne 122–23; quoting Steele,
Memoirs of
Mrs. Elizabeth Baddely
, 1787). Newspapers scrutinized and reported
yright material fr
her public behavior, chronicling when she began wearing his min-
Cop
iature around her neck, for instance, or when she began driving a
new carriage with an ambiguous blazon that looked, from a distance,
like a coronet. The affair with the Prince was first mentioned in the
newspapers—and the couple was first referred to publicly as Florizel
and Perdita—in July 1781 (Byrne 117). Both novels drop plenty of
references to details and events the public was likely to recognize.
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 26
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 26
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a
27
Effusions of Love
records the gift of a “miniature picture,” which
Florizel promises to wear “ever” on his bosom, attached with a rib-
bon, “as it would be imprudent to fix it to my watch” (28). The phras-
ing here possibly alludes to Lady Craven’s
The Miniature Picture
, in
which Robinson played Sir Harry Revel, one of the “breeches” roles
for which she became famous and which she was playing on her last
night at Drury Lane before retiring from the theater. In her
Memoirs
,
Robinson reports that the Prince once proposed that she meet him
dressed as a boy, but that she refused because of “The indelicacy of
such a step, as well as the danger of detection” (II. 50).
The Budget of
Love
reverses the transaction: Florizel gives Perdita a diamond-framed
veConnect - 2011-04-02
miniature, and she assures him that “The setting is most excellent;—
algra
the brilliancy of the diamonds are [sic] surpassed by nothing but the
celestial lustre that sparkles in the eyes of FLORIZEL!” (72).16 She
tells him she has decided to have her portrait painted, “presuming that
romso - PT
my FLORIZEL may give it some indifferent place in his Cabinet,”
although she adds disingenuously, “perhaps it will not be proper to
lioteket i
present, or be thought a gift worthy his reception” (78–79). This is
most likely a reference to one of a pair of portraits of her by Romney.
sitetsbib
According to Robinson’s biographer Paula Byrne, she began sitting
for this picture two weeks after her breakup with the Prince, and it
“was published as an engraving at the height of the letter negotiations
on August 25, 1781” (Byrne 154).
The authors of both novels include details like these, which they
can assume the public already knows, in order to establish the verac-
ity of those they encounter in these stories. Theirs is a finely calcu-
lated management of the “hermeneutic of intimacy” that Tom Mole
veconnect.com - licensed to Univer
describes, in which direct personal engagement with a celebrated fig-
ure is “marketed as a commodity” and at the same time offered as “an
.palgra
escape from the standardised impersonality of commodity culture”
(
Byron’s Romantic Celebrity
25). Mole and others locate the origins of
om www
modern celebrity culture at the end of the eighteenth century, when, as
Eric Eisner puts it, the public “emerged not just as an abstraction but
also as a spectatorial body; “a ‘gazing [. . .] multitude”—produced by
an accelerating set of technologies of publicity” (
Nineteenth-Century
yright material fr
Poetry and Literary Celebrity
21).17 Eisner is quoting from a passage
Cop
in Robinson’s
Memoirs
in which she describes being “overwhelmed
by the gazing of the multitude” at the height of the public’s preoccu-
pation with the affair (II. 67). This multitude, “massive, anonymous,
socially diverse, geographically distributed” (Mole,
Byron’s Romantic
Celebrity
3), is not only the crowd that inconveniences Robinson at
the shops or that, with “staring curiosity,” gathers around her box
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 27
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 27
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
28
R o y a l R o m a n c e s
at Ranelagh pleasure gardens (
Memoirs
II. 68). It is also the print-
consuming public, readers of the newspaper paragraphs and gossip
columns whose production soared at this period. The goal of these
publications was to make their audiences feel intimately connected
with the people they read about, emphasizing, in Mole’s phrasing,
“not just the permeability of private and public, but their commer-
cialised interpenetration” (
Byron’s Romantic Celebrity
5). In this new
kind of intimacy literacy replaces rank; anyone who can read can have
the same privileged access—can be in London and close enough to
the Prince’s and Robinson’s boxes at the opera to see their flirtatious
exchanges; can see the miniature pinned to her bosom and identify
veConnect - 2011-04-02
the Prince’s likeness; and, of course, can recognize the lovers’ pet
algra
names for each other, both part of public culture and the signals of a
private in-joke that everybody gets. As Eisner puts it, “At once indi-
vidual and collective, the feelings incited by celebrity are properly nei-
romso - PT
ther public nor private, but help organize through a sense of shared
emotional experience a new kind of public space in which deeply pri-
lioteket i
vate meanings find display” (7).
sitetsbib
Celebrity, Satire, and Family Secrets
Robinson’s description of the gazing multitude comes at the end of her
narrative of her affair with the Prince, suggesting that the apex of this
first stage of her celebrity coincided with, or even followed, the end of
the relationship. Recent criticism of Robinson, however, suggests that
she managed her public image and calculated the public’s reception
of her from at least the beginning of her acting career. Robinson was
veconnect.com - licensed to Univer
not only the Prince’s first publicly acknowledged mistress; she was his
first mistress who was a public figure before her association with him.
.palgra
She was an actress, and an actress in a town with only two licensed
theaters and two acting companies, whose principals rotated through
om www
a series of roles and were consequently on view every night during the
season. She had an audience who already felt that they knew her. In a
letter printed in the
Morning Post
of November 22, 1779, “Bo-Peep”
expresses and eroticizes this fantasy of intimacy by making “criti-
yright material fr
cism” the natural companion of courtship:
Cop
Criticism is a
cold
exercise of the mind: but as I feel an inexpressive
glow, while my imagination takes your fair hand in mine, I think I
may venture to court your acceptance of two or three remarks, which
are conveyed in a temperament of blood somewhat differing from the
chill, and the
acid
of the critique. (quoted in Byrne 90)
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 28
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 28
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
C h r o n i c l e s o f F l o r i z e l a n d P e r d i t a
29
Mole points out that Robinson’s acting career coincided with
“a time when the apparatus of theatrical celebrity was rapidly tak-
ing shape,” and “[a]ttention was increasingly focused on the star”
(“Mary Robinson’s Conflicted Celebrity” 187). Principals had mini-
mal rehearsals with the rest of the company and experienced mini-
mal directorial intervention. Thus they could establish direct links
with audience members, who increasingly “tended to sit in silence,
in a darkened auditorium, watching a star actor on a brightly lit
stage” making spectatorship seem “like an interpersonal interaction
between audience member and star” (
Byron’s Romantic Celebrity
19).
When Robinson joined the Drury Lane company in 1776, Garrick
veConnect - 2011-04-02
was no longer manager, and his innovations, most of them designed
algra
to increase the distance between audience and actors, had been in
place for over ten years.18 But members of the quality and royalty still
occupied boxes that allowed them to look almost directly over the
romso - PT
stage and even into the wings. Robinson writes about being aware
of the Prince’s eye on her, and hearing him make “some flattering
lioteket i
remarks” as she stood chatting with Lord Malden before going on
stage (
Memoirs
II. 38). This intimacy between actors and audience,
sitetsbib
Mole suggests, was increased by “the rise of a distinct genre of thes-
pian biography,” which “fed the audience’s interest in actors’ private
lives” (“Mary Robinson” 187). “A successful player,” as Paula Byrne
observes, “could only have a public private life” (89).
If star actors were one locus of this commercial interpenetration
of public and private realms, courtesans, many of whom were also
actresses, were another. Both Cindy McCreery and Laura Runge mark
the 1780s as the period of greatest interest in courtesans as public fig-
veconnect.com - licensed to Univer
ures (McCreery 100, Runge 567). The term courtesan, as McCreery
points out, was in flux throughout the century. Although it “was
.palgra
theoretically interchangeable with ‘prostitute’ . . . in practice, prints,
newspapers, and other commentaries increasingly drew distinctions
om www
between expensive, exclusive prostitutes and their cheaper, more
numerous counterparts. A courtesan and a streetwalker were viewed
as the two extremes of the spectrum of prostitution” (McCreery 81).
Courtesans were often indistinguishable from “notorious noble-
yright material fr
women” (Runge 567) and were the subjects of popular biographies,
Cop
gossip columns, and caricatures throughout the decade. As a star
actress, however, Robinson would have been a practiced participant
in the hermeneutic of intimacy even before she became either the
“Perdita” of these early novels or “the Perdita” of the satiric and por-
nographic literature that followed. In
Romantic Theatricality: Gender,
Poetry, and Spectatorship
, Judith Pascoe suggests that Robinson’s own
10.1057/9780230117488 - Royal Romances, Kristin Flieger Samuelian
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 29
9780230616301_03_ch01.indd 29
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
10/22/2010 6:03:00 PM
30
R o y a l R o m a n c e s
account of her life is the narrative “of a female subject under constant
surveillance.” From her debut in London as a young and pretty bride,
the object of rakish aristocratic gazes, through her theatrical career
and “notorious liaison” with the Prince, her
Memoirs
“can be read as
a record of increasing public exposure” (140). In “Mary Robinson’s
Conflicted Celebrity” Mole shows that Robinson was an adept man-
ager of this exposure in an age when female celebrity was at odds
with an emergent ideology of domesticity and separate spheres.19
Throughout her career, both as an actress and as a writer, Robinson
engaged in “a dialectic of revelation and concealment” (187), figured
by the transparent veil she wore in her debut performance at Drury
veConnect - 2011-04-02
Lane as Juliet (
Memoirs
I. 191). Through strategies of partial conceal-
algra
ment on and offstage, and a “rhetoric of physiognomy” in her poems,
essays, and novels, Robinson appeared to be offering her audience a
privileged access, including them, as Mole puts it, in “an asymmetri-